How did Thomas Malthus influence the world?

Written and fact-checked by The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

Thomas Malthus’s ideas influenced public policy (such as reforms of the English Poor Laws) and the work of economists, demographers, and evolutionary biologists, notably Charles Darwin. Malthus’s work reined in economic optimism, helped to justify a theory of wages based on workers’ minimum cost of subsistence, and discouraged traditional forms of charity.